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Efficient resource management is key to successful project planning. This article takes you through monday.com's resource management tools: Resource Directory, Resource planner, and Capacity manager. Learn how to define resource attributes, allocate resources, and track utilization across multiple projects to keep things running smoothly and on time.

Set up the Resource Directory 

To get started, set up the Resource Directory. This step lets you define assignees and placeholders for future resources, ensuring your project needs are fully covered.

Note: To access the Resource Directory, you must be an admin or have the Access resource directory account permission enabled. When you first open the Resource Directory, it may take up to 24 hours to sync all your account members, teams, viewers, and guests for display.

Click on your profile picture and select Resource Directory right under Administration. Then, click on Manage attributes to define key resource attributes like job roles, skills, and locations. Within each category, create custom labels that reflect your organization’s specific needs. 

Viewers and guests appear in the Resource Directory and can be managed alongside account members, including adding attributes.

Match your team members to their attributes by assigning previously defined job roles, skills, and locations to each resource. 

Tip: Job roles you set in the Resource Directory can then be used as placeholders within a project's Resource planner.

Add a Resource planner 

The Resource planner is a tool for creating high-level resource plans and making informed assignments for each project.

The project board and the Resource planner serve distinct but connected purposes. The project board is where execution happens and where the individual tasks and details needed to drive the project forward are stored. The Resource planner, on the other hand, operates at a higher level, helping you map out resource needs and assignments before execution begins. While tasks from the project board won’t appear in the planner, the two intersect in key ways: the planned timeline set in the Resource planner appears in the project overview, and assigned resources automatically show up first in the project’s People column. This ensures a smooth transition from planning to execution.

With the Resource planner, you can:

•  Assign team members to projects or use placeholders to plan for future resource needs
• Add allocations to define when the resource is required and how much effort is needed
• Customize effort distribution over the project timeline
• Create multiple allocations with varying effort levels

Once job roles are defined, creating a Resource planner is simple. If you're creating a project from scratch, click + from the left pane, and select Project. After naming it, make sure the Resource planner toggle is on before clicking Create project.

A new folder will then be created for both a project board and its corresponding Resource planner.

You can also add a Resource planner to an existing project by clicking the three-dot menu on the right-hand side of the project plan board, selecting Manage project components, and then Add resource planner as so:

Note: Project boards and templates created before February 2024 will not include the option to add the Resource planner.

Tip: You can add or remove a Resource planner at any stage. If you ever accidentally remove one, it can easily be restored without losing any data or allocations from the Manage project capabilities menu shown above.

After adding a Resource planner, you can create a resource plan in two ways: with monday sidekick or manually. The next sections cover both options.

Create a resource plan with monday sidekick

Use monday sidekick in the Resource planner to create a plan with a prompt. For example, you can ask Sidekick to set up a new project with the required roles (such as a project manager, web developers, a UX/UI designer, and a QA engineer), and allocate placeholders for each role across the project timeline.

From there, you can ask Sidekick to query the Resource Directory and replace those placeholders with the most relevant resources:

If project dates change, you can ask Sidekick to move the entire plan so allocations update automatically.

Once the plan is in place, you can also ask questions about planner data, such as, "How many hours are allocated for this resource in this project?"

You can continue working with Sidekick from the project itself as well, so planning, staffing, and project context stay connected in one workflow.

Set up your resource plan manually

If you prefer to set up your plan manually, you can add assignees (known team members) or placeholders (future resources based on job roles) to each project in the Resource planner. Use assignee if you know who will participate in the project. Otherwise, select a placeholder.

Click the Add resource button on the left side of the planner and select either Assignee or Placeholder:

Choosing an assignee requires you to select a team member from the list. Choosing a placeholder requires you to select a job role from the list (as set earlier in the Resource Directory). You can add multiple assignees and placeholders as needed.

Tip: Need more than one placeholder of the same type? The planner will automatically label them as Data analyst 1 and Data analyst 2, for example.

When adding an assignee, you can filter by attributes (like job role, skills, or availability) using the funnel icon:

This helps you narrow down the list and assign the most relevant people to your project.

Once assigned, each selected resource will appear on the left-hand side of the Resource planner.

Note: The Resource planner is aimed at internal project planning, so team members will not receive notifications when assigned. 

Use smart assignment with AI

Once placeholders have been added, you can use Smart assignment with AI to replace them with the most relevant real resources. The system reviews project context, job roles, skills, and availability to suggest the best match for each placeholder.

Tip: This feature is available in both the Resource planner and the Capacity manager for flexible staffing at any level.

To get started, click the AI star icon next to placeholders. A list of suggested team members will appear, based on the role and current capacity. You can choose to apply the assignment to all placeholders or only selected ones. Once you're ready, click Apply to confirm and turn your placeholders into real people.

Allocate efforts

Allocations specify the effort or total hours required for each resource. To add an allocation, click the + icon for a resource, set the Effort or Total Hours for each allocation, and drag the allocation bar to adjust the timeline. 

Tip: When selecting Total Hours, the specified hours are distributed evenly across the designated timeline you set per allocation.

Change effort display

The Resource planner offers flexible effort display options, such as hours per day, hours per week, days per month, or FTE (full-time employee), catering to different planning preferences. 

By default, effort is displayed as Hours per day, but you can adjust this in the top-left dropdown. 

The options are:

• Hours per day (8 hours/day)
• Hours per week (40 hours/week)
• Days per month
• FTE - (8 hours/day)

While the total effort remains the same across displays, the effort values change according to the selected display logic. If the Hours per day are set to 4 h/d, the same allocation will show as follows, based on the selected display:

• 20 Hours per week = (4 h/d * 5 working days)
• 10 Days per month = (4 h/d / 8 hours a day) * 20 days
• 0.5 FTE = (4 h/d / 8 hours a day)

Edit the planned project timeline 

At the top of the Resource planner, set or adjust the planned project timeline for better resource forecasting. 

Tip: The planned timeline set in the Resource planner will be reflected in the project board's overview.

Add task-level resourcing

To plan and track work at the task level, you can use task-level resourcing in your projects.

After allocating resources in the Resource planner, add tasks directly to the project board and fill in the task-level resource details for each task.

In the Resource column, assign one assignee or placeholder to each task:

The Timeline column is required for tasks to appear in the Resource planner. The Planned effort column records the total planned hours for each task, and the Effort spent column tracks the actual hours logged.

Note: Task-level resourcing is supported in both standard projects and multi-level projects, but the way items appear is different depending on the project type. In multi-level projects, parent items are rolled up, so only the lowest-level subitems appear in the Resource planner. In standard projects, both parent items and subitems appear in the Resource planner.

 

In the Resource planner, task-level resourcing lets you compare Allocations vs. planned effort and Allocations vs. effort spent:

Add a Capacity manager

The Capacity manager consolidates multiple Resource planners into a single dashboard, offering an overview of resource utilization across multiple projects.

Now that resources have been allocated within Resource planners, it's time to connect them to a Capacity manager for a broader view of workload distribution. Here's how to do it: 

• Select + in the left panel, and select Capacity manager
• Name it and connect relevant Resource planners from multiple projects

Alternatively, you can create a Capacity manager directly from a Resource planner by clicking on the three-dot menu right under your profile picture, choosing +Planning tools, and then Create next to the Capacity manager:

Note: When created from the left pane or from a Resource planner, a Capacity manager can connect up to 50 Resource planners. To manage more, create it from a portfolio, which supports up to 200 Resource planners.

 

In the newly created Capacity manager, you can identify overloaded and underutilized team members. To resolve this, reassign allocations from a placeholder to an assignee or from one assignee to another by clicking on the three dots of the allocation and selecting Reassign. Here, you can also add and delete resources and allocations as needed.

The maximum amount of effort a person can be assigned can be defined in the Capacity manager’s settings under Capacity. Here, you can switch between a Work schedule and Custom, which is hours per week. In the View settings, you can choose whether to present utilization as a number showing the total effort allocated (hours) or as a percentage, and select how to display effort (hours per day, hours per week, days per month, or FTE). Like in the Resource planner, you can adjust these effort displays in the Capacity manager, and the default effort estimation is set to Hours per day.

Note: If you connect projects that use task-level resourcing, the Capacity manager can also show task-level planned effort and effort spent.

 

You can group the Capacity manager by attributes to view resource utilization from different angles. For example, grouping by team will show each member’s capacity alongside the total effort for the entire team. This makes it easier to identify the right resources, allocate work efficiently, and get a high-level view of capacity using data from the Resource Directory.

When the Capacity Manager View Settings are set to FTE and it is grouped by job role, team, skill, or location, a gray aggregated line appears at the top of each group. This line shows the combined FTE of all resources in that group:

Note: Group-level FTE is calculated using 8 hours per day and 40 hours per week. Monthly FTE is calculated as 8 multiplied by the number of workdays in the month, excluding weekends only. This calculation does not account for holidays or time off. At the individual resource level, time off is taken into consideration, so individual utilization can appear lower than the group’s monthly aggregated FTE.

 

Need to share this view externally? Click the Export button in the top right corner to export the data to PDF. 

Connect your portfolio to a Capacity manager

Enhance resource planning across an entire portfolio by linking it to a Capacity manager. This would automatically include all Resource planners within a single portfolio, eliminating the need to manually select and maintain individual planners. Here's how to do it:

Choose a portfolio from the left pane, click on the three dots next to it, then +Portfolio Components and Add next to the Capacity manager.

Note: Capacity managers created from a portfolio can connect up to 200 Resource planners.

 

Alternatively, navigate to your portfolio, click on the three dots at the top right corner of the screen, choose +Portfolio Components, and then click Add next to the Capacity manager.

Once done, the portfolio Capacity manager will automatically include all Resource planners from the projects connected to the portfolio.

Note: For the portfolio Capacity manager to function correctly, all projects within the portfolio must have Resource planners. Resource planners cannot be manually added or removed from this view.

To sum up, the Resource Directory, Resource planner, and Capacity manager elevate your resource management. Whether you're assigning team members, managing placeholders, or tracking workloads at a portfolio level, these tools help you allocate resources effectively and keep your projects on track.